Kan eny wun spell ova heer?

I am a mother of three children all attending Mentor Schools. One thing that strikes me, when they are all doing homework, is their lack of grammar and spelling skills. (Now, before I start to rant and rave, please let me tell you I am by no means an expert at Grammar but I try, and that is what counts.) My husband and I do all we can to correct these mistakes and most of what we teach they remember.

However, what appalls me the most is when I see work they have done at school, complete with grammatical errors, checked by a teacher and not corrected. (the majority of the time, the students grade each others work – the blind leading the blind you wonder?) I have been told by teachers that the emphasis should be on the quantity of the work, not the quality.

Quantity not quality – you heard correctly.

Now, I did not go to school in the dark ages, I graduated in 1986, but one thing we were taught amongst others is that spelling matters. If an essay was a pie, spelling would be the gravy that holds the meat and vegetables together. We had daily spelling tests, and your grade was lowered (no matter what the lesson was) for bad spelling.

These days, bad spelling and poor grammatical skills are a given and the teachers I have met apparently think this is acceptable.

I think in today’s society, people are more accepting of spelling mistakes as it is such a common occurrence. These things just blend in with their everyday lives.

Here are 3 prime examples of bad spelling and how it has become acceptable. (all 3 examples were found on one road not far from where I live). Each one, worse than the previous.


Example 1 – complete and utter spelling mistake – A gas station sign



Granted it is “only” a gas station, but a mistake none-the-less.


Example 2 – An attempt at something I’m not sure what.



A prime example of American Businessmen trying, it appears, to be quaint, as in “Ye Olde English Shoppe”. However, as you can see, they missed the E and just assumed quite rightly, either nobody would notice – nor bloody care. I see this sign every day while driving by and I can’t begin to tell you how much of a headache I get. I’m not sure whether I am the only English person living in Mentor-on-the-Lake, and therefore suffering alone, but Businessmen, it’s either SHOPS (one P) or nothing at all.

Example 3 – A deliberate mistake that we have all come to accept.



This is seen so often that I’m sure if you polled 100 students as to the correct spelling of this word, 80 percent would agree this is the right way.

Could someone please explain to me how our children are to learn spelling and grammar if in their everyday lives, they are bombarded with blunders like the aforementioned.

We live in the year 2005 people, there is a marvelous invention called “spell check” which amazingly as it sounds, not only “Checks spelling”, it also gives grammar hints should you be writing something incorrectly. Before we had computers, there used to be this thing called a “Dictionary”. Imagine that, a book that teaches you how to spell!

There is no reason that this should be allowed nor accepted. Are we just too lazy as a society to do anything about it? Apparently.